EAW's Breaking News archive

Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), the company behind the Dakota Access pipeline, has filed a broad legal assault against Greenpeace and many other organizations that oppose this highly controversial fossil fuel project. Why should you care? Because this lawsuit represents a many-faceted and very real threat to everyone's First Amendment rights to protest and organize in defense of people and planet.
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As the world watches with mounting concern the growing tensions and bellicose rhetoric between the United States and North Korea, one of the most remarkable aspects of the situation is the absence of any public acknowledgement of the underlying reason for North Korean fears -- or, as termed by United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, "state of paranoia" -- namely, the horrific firebombing campaign waged by the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War and the unprecedented death toll that resulted from that bombing.
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Veterans who say they responded to a 1966 accident involving US hydrogen bombs in Spain and then became ill from radiation exposure asked a federal appeals court on Monday to allow a class action lawsuit against the US Department of Veterans Affairs.
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Senator Ron Wyden writes: "In September, the Pentagon escaped budget cuts -- while Meals on Wheels and the National Parks budgets were slashed. The Senate voted to increase military spending by an extra $80 billion a year, resulting in a $700 billion Department of Defense budget. I was one of only 8 members of the Senate who voted NO on this bill. Why? One of the reasons was because we don’t know where this money goes since the Pentagon has NEVER had an audit."
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For almost 2 decades, the US pursued a list of 'enemy countries' to confront, attack, weaken and overthrow. This imperial quest to overthrow 'enemy countries' operated at various levels of intensity, depending on two considerations: the level of priority and the degree of vulnerability for a 'regime change' operation. The author explores how iImperial strategists consider military, economic and political criteria in identifying high priority adversaries.
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When Washington sends the Pentagon to war, thousands of young lives are put at risk to ensure that a few thousand American households remain free to take most of the world's seized wealth. From 2012 to 2017, the US took nearly 70 percent of the entire global wealth gain over the past five years. Based on their dominant share of US wealth, America’s richest 10% -- much less than 1% of the world's adult population -- took more than half the world's wealth gain in the past five years.
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Today is Human Rights Day, the 69th Anniversary of the UN General Assembly's adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It's a day to remember all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights -- from Hanan Badr el-Din, an Egyptian woman who has been searching for her missing husband since 2013 to young academics, policy analysts and activists who have issued an appeal regarding the rights of current and future generations to a world free from the threat of nuclear weapons.
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Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the UK Labour Party and a member of Parliamentarians for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament gave the following keynote policy speech on human rights at the United Nations in Geneva on Dec 8. Corbyn told the packed auditorium that: "We need to redouble our efforts to create a global rules based system that applies to all and works for the many, not the few. No more 'bomb first' and think and talk later."
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Who authorized this invasion of Syria? The Syrian government never authorized US troops to deploy there and isn't supporting the idea of them staying. Who authorized American troops to be on the front lines in another war in a country that has branded American troops as invaders? Imagine if Syria or Russia did this to the US -- invading and building bases under the guise of fighting terrorism.
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Commentary: "A culture raised on Rambo, Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker and James Bond wants to believe that combat and killing can be done with impunity -- that we can declare someone to be the enemy and that for cause and country the soldiers will cleanly and remorselessly wipe him from the face of the Earth."
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When the Pentagon wants to mislead the public about where US troops are, generally speaking, they just lie. Yet sometimes the number of troops is just too big to claim as a rounding error, and questions start happening. This week, the focus is on over 44,000 US military personnel deployed to "unknown," which immediately raises red flags, because that's not a place. Pentagon officials, however, say there is "no good way" to describe where they are.
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In 2010, the Obama administration negotiated the New START treaty with Russia, which limited both sides' deployed strategic nuclear weapons to 1,550. Despite both countries being on track to meeting the limit by the 2018 deadline, experts and former officials warn the risk of nuclear conflict is far from eliminated. In fact, the stricter limitation on the number of weapons has only spurred both countries to initiate modernization programs to improve the efficiency, accuracy, and lethality of their weapons systems.
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These 20 companies, which are the focus of this report, are involved in the nuclear weapons programmes of the United States, the United Kingdom, France and India. The full "Don't Bank on Bombs" report examines which financial institutions around the world invest in these companies through shares, bonds and loans.
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Many Americans are unaware that much of the responsibility for nuclear weapons development, production, and maintenance lies with the Department of Energy, which spends more on nuclear weapons than it does on developing sustainable energy sources. Key to the DOE's nuclear project are the federal laboratories where nuclear weapons are designed, built, and tested. Meanwhile, a small number of powerful companies are making billions working on weapons systems designed to end life on Earth.
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Donald Trump's "Jerusalem declaration" has been roundly criticized worldwide, with Israel seemingly the only nation to endorse it. Even there, the declaration sparked massive protests among the Palestinian population under Israeli occupation, who see Trump's move as effectively ending the peace process. At least 31 Palestinians hurt in Israeli army fire on Thursday as anger over the White House move sweeps West Bank and Gaza.
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After a mass shooting in a church left 26 people dead, Donald Trump quickly moved to deflect growing public concern by claiming: "This isn't a gun situation. This is a mental health problem at the highest level." Once again, the "crazy gunman" meme had been unleashed in the mediastream, shifting attention from the weapons to the individual and suggesting that the solution involved controlling individuals, not their arsenals. But what if owning multiple guns was, itself, a sign of mental illness?
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It would be laughable if it weren't so deadly. Here's how Republicans have finally moved beyond their thoughts and prayers for the victims of gun violence -- with a reckless, dangerous bill to undermine gun safety laws across the country. The right-wing Republican extremists in the House have passed an NRA dream bill -- The Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act -- that would force every state in the US to abide by the weakest state gun laws in the entire country -- a "guns everywhere" vision for America.
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Since US President Donald Trump entered the White House, there is one achievement he can't be denied. He has made good on a campaign promise to repeal hundreds of "job-killing" federal rules, often following recommendations from powerful industries. The US pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement -- essentially breaching the promise to curb planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions -- and has begun to roll-back environmental protections designed to reduce toxic emissions from industrial polluters.
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For decades American presidential candidates from both parties have promised to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. But once elected they have retreated from the idea. On Wednesday, Donald Trump changed that. He overruled his top political and military advisers to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital and announce plans to relocate the US embassy. Trump's decision has been widely condemned and has sparked protests in many parts of the Middle East and the wider Muslim world.
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The Pentagon's impact on the Potomac River is not simply the diffuse impact of global warming and rising oceans contributed to by the US military's massive oil consumption. Not only does the home of war-making sit near rising waters -- rising first and foremost because of the impacts of war-making -- the waters of the Potomac and of the Chesapeake Bay into which it flows, and the tides of which raise and lower the waters of the Pentagon Lagoon each day -- are heavily polluted by war preparations.
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The final elimination of ISIS in Iraq and Syria is close, but it has only been achieved at the cost of great destruction and loss of life. This is the new face of war that governments try to conceal: a limited number of combat troops on the ground call in devastating air strikes from planes, missiles and drones -- be they American or Russian -- to clear the way for their advance. US and British claims that smart weapons enable them to avoid killing civilians is simply untrue. There is no such thing as precision air strikes.
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Commentary: Tax proposals can be complex, but the GOP's 429-page monster is shockingly easy to understand: The Trump-Ryan-McConnell triumvirate intends to take money from millions of working families and give it to the world's wealthiest people and corporations. The GOP bill is an act of class warfare that gives half its cuts to the top 1 percent, raises taxes on 36 percent of working families, adds $71 billion to the cost of a college education while benefitting wealthy individuals and special interests.
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As US warplanes flew above a cluster of villages where Islamic State militants were holed up in eastern Afghanistan, 11 people piled into a truck and drove off along an empty dirt track to escape what they feared was imminent bombing. They did not get far.
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In May 2017, the Washington DC-based, Nobel Peace Prize-winning Physicians for Social Responsibility released a landmark study concluding that the death toll from 10 years of the "War on Terror" was at least 1.3 million, and could be as high as 2 million. Despite being the first effort to produce a scientifically robust calculation of the number of people killed by the US-UK-led "war on terror, " the 97-page report has been almost completely blacked out by the English-language media.
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Today there are 17,300 nuclear warheads in the hands of nine countries -- the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, India , Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. On December 10, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and Hiroshima-bomb survivor Setsuko Thurlow will accept the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the global campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons. In November 2017, Mexico’s Senate approved the treaty. The treaty will go into effect when 50 countries have signed and ratified it.
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The plight of the non-citizen veterans of US military service who have been deported stands as a small but telling example of how our country falls far short of living up to its promises. The ACLU estimates that there are around 300 US veterans deported to countries around the world. These veterans are now stuck in a country they may have left as infants; some do not even speak the language.
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Vigilant Ace, the annual US-South Korea military drill comes amid heightened tensions in the region triggered by Kim Jong Un's missile and nuclear tests and the ratcheting up of rhetoric from both sides. A total of 230 planes will fly from eight locations in South Korea, the Air Force said in a statement. North Korea described the exercises as a "grave provocation" that could escalate the situation "to the brink of nuclear war."
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Despite widespread warnings of "dangerous consequences," senior US officials say Donald Trump is likely to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital Wednesday and delay embassy relocation for another six months, yet begin planning the move immediately. Saudi King Salman warned Trump that transferring the embassy is a dangerous step that will inflame feelings of Muslims. Fatah has already begun preparations for "three days of rage" protest rallies.
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While Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un wage an escalating war of words over Pyongyang's nuclear-weapons program, the US military is quietly transforming its forces on the Korean Peninsula, expanding their ability to wage war with the North. The centerpiece of the transformation is Camp Humphreys, a sprawling new installation south of Seoul where the majority of the roughly 30,000 US troops in South Korea will soon be based.
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Commentary: "If Americans want a free society at home, then they must convince the US government to give up its global empire . . . . If you allow your government to maintain an empire abroad, then you can't possibly expect a free and open society at home. This fact is staring us in the face as police departments across the country accept the surplus military equipment used in foreign occupations."
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To date, debate over the implications of the growing use of armed drones has focused on human rights and on the imbalances created by the ability to project violence at a distance. Concerns about the environmental and humanitarian impacts of drone operations have been largely ignored -- until now. Airstrikes from armed drones typically use explosive weapons that pose risks to human health following their initial impacts, particularly when these weapons are used in populated areas.
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As the threat of military conflict with North Korea looms, the American public is largely unaware of the sobering facts about America's longest unresolved war and one of the world's bloodiest. The 1953 armistice agreement engineered by President Eisenhower -- halting a three-year-long "police action" that resulted in two-to-four million military and civilian deaths -- is long forgotten, along with the Agreed Framework, a bilateral non-proliferation pact, that opened the door to ending the Korean war.
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President Donald Trump has increased the number of US troops and civilians working for the Department of Defense in the Middle East to 54,180 from 40,517 in the past four months, representing a 33-percent rise. And this number doesn't even account for the big rise in troops stationed in Afghanistan since Trump announced his new strategy for the fight against the Taliban in late August.
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Technology could be used to wipe out malaria carrying mosquitos or other pests but UN experts say fears over possible military uses and unintended consequences strengthen case for a ban. A US military agency is investing $100 million in genetic extinction technologies that could wipe out malarial mosquitoes, invasive rodents or other species.
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For all the talk about the big Republican tax cut it's really only about $150 billion per year -- although proponents multiply it by 10 years, so that $1.5 trillion sounds like a lot. Arguments about how to pay for it may end up derailing or neutering it in the end. Which is ironic, since Trump wants to add $50 billion to the defense budget. But no one wants to talk about defense waste during these tax debates. Why is the Pentagon budget untouchable?
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The Military-Industrial Complex has loomed over America ever since President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of its growing influence during his prescient farewell address on Jan. 17, 1961. This year, a robust collection of 208 defense companies spent $93,937,493 to deploy 728 "reported" lobbyists (apparently some go unreported) to feed this year's trumped-up, $700 billion defense-only budget. War, as the great Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler aptly put it, is little more than a money-making "racket."
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Admiral Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that "the greatest threat to our national security is our debt." Former Congressmember Ron Paul says that only about half the defense budget is for defense, the other half is for militarism abroad. So here are 16 ways to cut its waste, fraud, and abuse of American taxpayers.
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When a 97-page report by Physicians for Social Responsibility (the Nobel Peace Prize-winning doctors' group) provided the first accounting of civilian casualties from US-led "counter-terrorism" interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, it was almost completely blacked out by the English-language media. The report found the US "War on Terror" had killed perhaps as many as 2 million Muslims. Undisputed UN figures show 1.7 million Iraqi civilians (half children) died due to the West's brutal sanctions.
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Analysis: Citing "support for terrorist organizations" and "active ballistic missile development program" Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has announced that the Trump administration is "committed to addressing the totality of the Iranian threat." But the obsession with these Iranian policies amounts to threat inflation. Neither poses a serious threat to America's domestic security or core national interests and they don't warrant jettisoning a thus-far successful nuclear nonproliferation agreement.
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The end of the cold war meant world peace was finally at hand, yet 26 years later there is still no peace because Imperial Washington confounds it. The fact is, the modern Warfare State has been the incubator of American imperialism since the Cold War, and is now proving itself utterly invulnerable to fiscal containment, even in the face of a $19 trillion national debt. The War Party entrenched in the nation's capital is dedicated to economic interests and ideological perversions that guarantee perpetual war -- and perpetual profits.
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With international complaints about war crimes mounting, and a vote on US involvement in Yemen having just been derailed by the Congressional leadership, another vote on Saudi weapons sales is likely forthcoming, following reports the Saudis have made deals for another $7 billion in US arms related to the devastating war in Yemen. The deals are with Raytheon and Boeing to provide "precision guided munitions."
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Bayer and Monsanto have filed a merger request with antitrust authorities in Europe and the US. If they succeed, we'll face a nightmare scenario: more bee-killing neonics in our fields, more toxic glyphosate on our plates, more corporate control over our food supply. Regulators can still stop this merger, but they’re getting hammered by corporate lobbyists pressuring them to back off. That's why we need to move fast -- antitrust regulators have a limited amount of time to take action, and the clock is ticking.
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US oil refineries that are unable to sell a dirty fuel waste product at home are exporting vast quantities of it around the world, to more than 30 countries, especially to energy-hungry India. Petroleum coke, the bottom-of-the-barrel leftover from refining Canadian tar sands crude and other heavy oils, is cheaper and burns hotter than coal. But "petcoke" also contains more planet-warming carbon and far more heart- and lung-damaging sulfur.
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Warring visions have now erupted over the energy and economic futures of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Will the islands become a green-powered solartopia or a fossil-fueled robber baron playground like Hong Kong or Singapore? Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have proposed a $146 billion green "Marshall Plan" to rebuild Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Solar panels are already pouring in.
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Philip Alston, the United Nations monitor on extreme poverty and human rights, has embarked on a coast-to-coast tour of the US to hold the world's richest nation -- and its president -- to account for the hardships endured by America's most vulnerable citizens. With at least 41 million Americans living in poverty, the UN mission hopes to demonstrate that no country, however wealthy, is immune from human suffering induced by growing inequality. Nor is any nation, however powerful, beyond the reach of human rights law.
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For our culture of militarism, violence and our nationalist concept of American Exceptionalism, we must have an enemy. We view ourselves as Good, so there must be a Bad or an Evil. American Exceptionalism and the violence that comes with it (believed to be redemptive and justice-based), is a Manichean, binary framework, so Americans must have an adversary or an enemy.
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In August 2017, ten villagers in Somalia were killed in a military raid conducted by US and Somali troops. According to a recent investigation by the Daily Beast, they were killed by Americans. A subsequent Pentagon/AFRICOM investigation claimed that those killed were all enemy combatants. Who's telling the truth? But more importantly, why are American troops even operating in a country like Somalia.
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The Pentagon will indefinitely delay a ban on the use of older types of cluster bombs due to take effect on Jan. 1, 2019, officials said, arguing that safety improvements in munitions technology failed to advance enough to replace older stockpiles. Disclosure of the new policy met sharp criticism from Congress and human rights groups.
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Two massive truck bombs exploded in quick succession in Mogadishu Saturday night, killing at least 300 and wounding more than 300 others. It was the deadliest attack in Somalia since the rise of the al-Shabab militant group a decade ago. The disaster is now being referred to as the "Mogadishu massacre" and some are calling it "the 9/11 of the Somali people." The explosions came after the Trump administration stepped up a US campaign against al-Shabab in Somalia.
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Philip Alston, the United Nations monitor on extreme poverty and human rights, has embarked on a coast-to-coast tour of the US to hold the world's richest nation -- and its president -- to account for the hardships endured by America's most vulnerable citizens. With at least 41 million Americans living in poverty, the UN mission hopes to demonstrate that no country, however wealthy, is immune from human suffering induced by growing inequality. Nor is any nation, however powerful, beyond the reach of human rights law.
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The Enewetak Atoll is all but invisible on Google Maps. Halfway between Australia and Hawaii, the ribbon of land is home to a small indigenous population that has seen their way of life eroded by decisions far outside of their control. For more than half a century, the atoll, which is part of the Marshall Islands, has been contaminated by nuclear explosions and waste. The decades ahead could leave it submerged by rising seas.
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Climate change means ice, where polar bears are most at home, is melting earlier in the year and so polar bears have to spend longer on land, scientists say. This might wow tourists but means the bears, more crammed together on coasts and islands, will eventually face greater competition for the little food there is on land. Locals are also at risk from hungry animals venturing into villages.
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The .45 ACP M1911A1 pistol has served the US armed forces for more than a century. Now, thanks to this year's $700 billion federal defense budget, "at least 80,000" of these deadly combat weapons sold to civilian gun owners. The Defense Authorization Act that Congress sent to Donald Trump's desk on Nov. 16 requires the Secretary of the Army to transfer a cache of small arms and ammo to the Civilian Marksmanship Program, including the M1911 and M1911A1 pistols, the M-1 Garand, and .22 rimfire rifles.
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Three times as many land protectors were killed in 2012 than 10 years previously, with the rate doubling to an average of two people a week in the past four years. 2017 is on course to be the deadliest year on record for land rights defenders. 153 activists have been assassinated so far this year -- and those are the ones we know of. Thousands more face displacement, violence, intimidation, and arrest -- all for standing up for their right to live on their land.
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After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia cut off the flow of cheap oil and ended the guaranteed prices for Cuban sugar, devastating the island's economy. As food supplies dwindled, malnutrition became alarmingly common. The country's leaders responded by implementing a number of petroleum-free alternatives aimed at making the country self-sufficient. With cars few and far between, bicycles became nearly ubiquitous on Havana's streets. Urban gardens sprang up on unused patches of land.
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On November 19, Air Force Gen. John Hyten, commander of the US Strategic Command, declared he would refuse to follow an illegal presidential order to launch a nuclear attack. "If you execute an unlawful order, you will go to jail," the general explained at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia. "You could go to jail for the rest of your life." In the military, there is a legal duty to obey a lawful order -- but also a legal duty to disobey an unlawful order.
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Commentary: After a nine-year absence, Donald Trump has announced that he was returning North Korea to the US list of "state sponsors of terrorism." Has Pyongyang been found guilty of some spectacular terrorist attack overseas or perhaps of plotting to overthrow another country by force? No, that is not the case. Trump believes that continuing down the path toward confrontation with North Korea will lead the country to capitulate to Washington's demands. That will not happen.
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Commentary: Now the day of reckoning has arrived, marked by the meeting of Presidents Bashar al Assad and Vladimir Putin in Sochi -- a meeting of militaries, whose success on the battlefield against Western-backed terrorists has brought us to this point. So we need to be clear about what happened. As in Bosnia 25 years earlier, mixed ethnic communities who had peacefully coexisted for centuries were turned against one another by foreign actors in a fundamentally malicious plan to "divide and rule."
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Syria's government is trying to quash a rebellion by bombing hospitals. Still, brave doctors -- many of them American volunteers -- are risking everything to save lives. In besieged East Ghouta, Syria, nearly 400,000 civilians are facing severe shortages of basic goods and lifesaving medical care. In its latest brief, "Under Siege: The Plight of East Ghouta," SAMS highlights the devastating impact of the four-year long blockade on the health sector and underscores the pressing need to break the siege.
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While governments buy weapons, market weapons to other governments, donate weapons to other governments, and bestow tax breaks on weapons dealers, there is another less-visible way in which public money sustains weapons dealing. Public pension and retirement funds are invested, directly and indirectly, in weapons companies. Teachers and other public servants whose interests ought to lie with promoting human needs have their retirement security tied up with maintaining or enlarging the war industry.
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What can the cargo, shipping, and cruise industries do to play a part in limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels -- the most ambitious goal laid out in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement? To meet that target, all cargo ships will need to be "zero-emissions" by 2050. That requires ditching cheap, but noxious, bunker fuel and replacing it with promising alternatives like battery storage, sustainable biofuels, hydrogen fuel cells, and wind-sail technology.
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Fidel Castro's commitment to education and health care stand out as monumental achievements for Cuba. While he emerged as a stalwart of anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, his commitment to environmentalism and Cuba's achievements in the area gets less attention. Cuba is one of the few developing countries that has shown a strong commitment to the environment and sustainability -- despite a number of obstacles such as the long-standing US blockade.
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An unnatural number of earthquakes hit Texas in the past decade. In 2008, two earthquakes stronger than magnitude 3 struck the state. Eight years later, the number of strong quakes increased four-fold. The tremors have multiplied along with a recent increase in natural gas extraction -- including fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, but other techniques as well -- which produces a lot of wastewater that is injected deep into the ground where it can work its way into dormant faults, triggering quakes.
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Wall Street billionaires, corporate lobbyists and far right conservatives flooded the White House almost immediately after Donald Trump's presidential victory, according to records of visitor logs the White House was forced to reveal following a Freedom of Information lawsuit. Meanwhile, Trump's climate-change-denying EPA pick, Scott Pruitt, is moving to replace independent scientists on EPA advisory boards with representatives of the fossil fuel and chemical industries.
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Donald Trump's first appearance at the United Nations was a watershed moment. In an address notable for its belligerence, he marked his place not only as a harbinger of the erosion of the post Cold-War international legal order, but as an active agent of its destruction. His threat to "totally destroy North Korea" and its people runs contrary to both the letter and spirit of United Nations Charter. Trump's threat to wage "preventive war" whenever US leaders deem it necessary was also an attack on the UN itself.
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On the 5th of November, Cian Westmoreland spoke at a General Assembly in Berlin along with 69 other delegates from around the world. Cian delivered an emotional testimony on his role as an assassination drone operator in Afghanistan. The delegates at this international meeting addressed issues ranging from mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo -- where a war has raged for over a decade, taking 7 million lives -- to the abuses animals endure in our factory farms.
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CNN recently aired a powerful report from Libya, where the reporters went into a house and shot footage of an auction of human beings. Yes, a 21st-century slave market -- grotesque: evidence of how terrible the situation is these days not only in Libya, but also in the Sahel region of Africa. The US, Britain and France were the leaders of the NATO-engineered destruction of Libya in 2011. What we see now is the detritus of NATO's disastrous policies.
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The New York Times editorial board recently took an unusual position of denouncing what it called "war crimes" by a US ally, in a war in which the United States is actively participating militarily. "Saudis try to starve Yemen into submission," was the headline, and it was no exaggeration. Nearly seven million people, including millions of children, are facing famine owing to blockades of food and medicine and Saudi-coalition bombings carried out with military assistance by the United States.
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The tax bill being debated in the House is a bad deal. In addition to cutting taxes for the wealthy at the expense of middle class and low-income families, it poses a major threat to the success of electric vehicles and renewable energy technologies that save consumers money, create jobs, and reduce climate and air pollution. Meanwhile, as of November 22, Costa Rica had run on 100% renewable energy for more than 300 days. In 2016, the US generated only about 15 percent of its power from renewables.
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The House and Senate tax bill committees have approved a controversial "Amazon amendment" that would turn over federal procurement of off-the-shelf items, a $53 billion market, to e-commerce portals. The provision would guarantee billions of dollars in new revenue to Amazon. "It seems like Amazon wrote it," said Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, "It will accelerate the transfer of more and more government spending to Amazon."
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With international complaints about war crimes mounting, and a vote on US involvement in Yemen having just been derailed by the Congressional leadership, another vote is likely forthcoming, following reports the Saudis have been promised another $7 billion in US arms. Congressional votes on arms sales have historically been easy to pass, but weapons sold to the Saudis have left thousands of Yemeni civilians killed in the US-backed war amid growing concern that these arms sales constitute US culpability.
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Northern Yemen is facing calamitous shortages due to a Saudi blockade, with many civilians dying in from the lack of food, medicine, and a cholera epidemic that is among the worst in human history. Millions are facing malnutrition and outright famine. Despite the Saudi's promise earlier this week that they would lift the blockade on northern Yemen at noon on Thursday, the time came and went. UN and other humanitarian aid ships continue to be blocked from the port of Hodeida and Yemenis continues to die.
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On Monday, US Army General John Nicholson announced a "new strategy" of attacking opium factories, saying he wanted to hit the Taliban "where it hurts, in their narcotics financing." But as US and Afghan forces pounded Taliban drug factories this week, farmers in the country's largest opium producing-province and narcotics experts say the strategy just repeats previous failed efforts to stamp out the trade.
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The world has never been richer. Credit Suisse's researchers have discerned "a significant increase in wealth across the globe." The problem is, these numbers have benefited only a precious few. The top 1 percent globally now hold 50.1 percent of the world's household wealth. With inequality ripping us apart -- and with few of our national leaders willing or able to confront the problem -- the United States of America may never again be an equitable and functional society.
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Thanks to an October 31 report by the Congressional Budget Office, we now have a 30-year outline of both the kinds of destructive weaponry we are buying, and how much it is going to cost. There are good reasons to be worried. Total cost: $1.2 trillion. Enough money to fund five Environmental Protection Agencies. The "deterrence" value of such an investment isn't immediately clear. But the fiscal impacts will certainly further bankrupt the already debt-burdened US economy.
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Of all weapons in the US nuclear arsenal, the ICBM is the one most likely to cause accidental nuclear war, arms-control specialists say. It is for this reason that a growing number of former top Pentagon officials, military scholars and members of Congress are calling for the elimination of ICBMs. Former defense secretaries William Perry and Leon Pancetta are among those warning that, of all weapons in the US nuclear arsenal, the ICBM is the one most likely to cause accidental nuclear war.
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According to internal documents reviewed by Reuters, a group of about a dozen US State Department officials have taken the unusual step of formally accusing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson of violating a federal law designed to stop foreign militaries from enlisting child soldiers when he decided in June to exclude Iraq, Myanmar, and Afghanistan from a US list of offenders in the use of conscripted, underage soldiers.
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Three men were recently arrested for plotting bomb attacks on US soil. Despite their intent to inflict mass casualties on US citizens, there were virtually no reports on these plots in the US mass media. Why? The stories didn't go viral -- and Trump didn't tweet about the would-be mass-killers -- because the men were not immigrants, Mexicans, or Muslims. They were all White.
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In 1963, President John F. Kennedy was speaking at a time when, like now, Russia and the United States had enough nuclear weapons ready to fire at each other on a moment's notice to destroy the earth for human life many times over. Kennedy framed his speech as a remedy for ignorance, specifically the ignorant view that war is inevitable. Kennedy renounced the idea of a "Pax Americana enforced on the world by US weapons of war -- precisely what both major political parties now favor.
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Thanks to an October 31 report by the Congressional Budget Office, we now have a 30-year outline of both the kinds of destructive weaponry we are buying, and how much it is going to cost. There are good reasons to be worried. Total cost: $1.2 trillion. Enough money to fund five Environmental Protection Agencies. The "deterrence" value of such an investment isn't immediately clear. But the fiscal impacts will certainly further bankrupt the debt-burdened US economy.
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American troops were told to ignore the rape and abuse of children by Afghan security forces they were partnered with, according to a report released on November 16 by the Pentagon's Inspector General. "Bacha bazi," which translates as "boy play," is a cultural practice in which "powerful or wealthy local figures and businessmen sexually abuse young boys who are trained to dance in female clothes," the report reads.
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The Appalachian woodlands, an ecological treasure covering 61,500 square miles of the country's southeast, are now threatened by the Trump administration's unsustainable commercial energy and timber exploitation. A leaked draft of a five-year plan reveals how the DOI plans to prioritize "energy dominance" over conservation. Meanwhile, the Department of the Interior is poised to open up millions of wilderness acres to commercial drilling and mining -- from Utah's red-rock country to Alaska's frigid coastal waters.
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A November 22, 2017 poem in memory of President John F. Kennedy and a documentary investigation into the "missing bullet" fired on the day of his assassination in Dallas, Texas.
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When used in populated areas, explosive weapons cause great harm to individuals as well as to communities. According to Action on Armed Violence, between 80 and 90% of the people injured or killed are civilians in incidents where explosive weapons are used in populated areas. The use of these weapons also damages and destroys critical infrastructure such as housing, schools, hospitals, and water and sanitation systems, resulting in devastating long-term effects on people's lives far beyond the conflict itself.
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As the United Nations' first formal meeting about killer robots came to a close on November 17, 2017, tech experts and critics continued to warn about the military use of autonomous weapons and called for more urgent action to curb the threat they pose. While support builds for an outright ban of robotic weapons, powerful nations with large technology industries are resistant to imposing expansive limitations that would compromise their potential revenues.
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Over ten thousand people have been killed in the war in Yemen, and millions of Yemeni people are starving. Their nation is being ravaged by the worst cholera outbreak in human history. Senator Chris Murphy called our continued involvement in this war "barbaric." Last week, Congress voted overwhelmingly to say that complicity in war crimes is unacceptable. Instead of selling high-tech weapons to Saudi Arabia, we should be using our diplomatic power to end the senseless slaughter of innocent civilians.
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Four weeks after his funeral, more remains of slain US Army Sgt. La David Johnson have retrieved from the spot near the village of Tongo Tongo, Niger, where Johnson and three other US soldiers were ambushed and killed on Oct. 4. There continue to be contrary claims by both soldiers and higher authorities in Niger regarding the attack that left the soldiers dead.
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Under existing nuclear doctrine, as imagined by the Obama administration back in 2010, this country was to use nuclear weapons only "in extreme circumstances" to defend the vital interests of the country or of its allies. However, for Donald Trump, a man who has already threatened to unleash on North Korea "fire and fury like the world has never seen," such an approach is proving far too restrictive.
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Preventing the US from triggering a nuclear apocalypse isn't just general common sense. It's also urgently-needed protection from a president with an itchy Twitter finger and the sole authority to launch nuclear war. Congressman Adam Smith has just introduced a one-sentence bill that gets right to the point: "It is the policy of the US to not use nuclear weapons first." Meanwhile Rep. Jim McGovern has introduced the "Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act" to block Trump's ability to start a nuclear war.
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The Saudi-led blockade of Yemen isn't just targeting food supplies. As 60 Minutes found, it's also stopping reporters. Discover how the network's producers got this week's footage of the widespread humanitarian calamity the US-backed Saudi war is having on the desperate men, women and children of Yemen.
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The US mega-corporation Amazon, run by the world's richest man, Jeff Bezos, has just partnered with the Pentagon on a $53 billion Pentagon-Amazon procurement deal. As Amazon continues to entrench itself as the nation's commissary, huge government supply deals like Pentagon-Amazon procurement deal approved by Congress will leave little room for competitors and raise the specter of government-coddled monopoly.
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Since 1992 -- with the exception of stabilizing the stratospheric ozone layer -- humanity has failed to make sufficient progress in solving our major environmental challenges. Most are getting far worse. In this paper, a team of leading scientists examine the troubling trends over the last 25 years and suggest possible remedies. The article has received support from more than 15,000 signatories from all ends of the Earth -- the most scientists to ever co-sign and formally support a published journal article.
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According to an alarming study published in the Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program in Marine Policy, Pacific Island nations -- surrounded by the warmest waters of the global ocean -- are expected to lose 50 to 80 percent of fish species by the end of the century. Meanwhile, the Gulf of Alaska cod populations appear to have taken a nose-dive -- the "worst they've ever seen." The warming water, which has spread to depths of more than 1,000 feet, "hit the cod like a kind of a double-whammy."
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In 2003, Europe sweltered in 100-degreeheat that killed between 35,000 and possibly 70,000 people. Seven years later, a similar hot spell killed 55,000 people in Russia. Five years later, record heat killed more than 2,000 people in India and Pakistan. In the decades ahead, as temperatures rise and droughts intensify, Northern California's climate, vegetation, and wildlife may begin to look more like Southern California does today.
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Noam Chomsky, a noted linguist and a pointed criticic of US foreign policy speaks with Bulletin of Atomic Scientist's senior editor Lucien Crowder about the Trump administration's policies on climate change, nuclear modernization, North Korea, and Iran -- and about an intensification of "the extremely severe threats that all of us face." According to Chomsky, the US, under Trump and the Republican Party, is racing toward disaster.
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The US is flaunting international law: first, by invading Syria and second, by building at least 10 "permanent" military bases inside the very country the US has been punishing for more than six years -- via economic, media, and armed military attacks. Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies are demanding the US leave Syria while "the lawlessness of the US hegemon threatens to engulf the region in sectarian conflict thanks to Washington's Machiavellian meddling in a sovereign nation's affairs on almost every front."
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New York Times reporters looking into the Pentagon's role in civilian deaths inside Iraq have uncovered a "consistent failure by the coalition to investigate claims properly or to keep records that make it possible to investigate." The Times concludes the Pentagon's accounting of war crimes may have made the Global War on Terror "the least transparent war in recent American history."
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Commenetary: There are two key ways the faulty use of combat power abroad continues to deteriorate our security. The US Constitution decrees that Congress alone has the power to declare war but today the Executive branch has assumed virtually sole discretion for the deployment of the military. The second and more troubling misuse of the military involve the missions they are given to execute.
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Tell Scott Pruitt to do his job to protect our health and stop ignoring the growing risks from climate change. Push back against Trump's efforts to kill clean car standards that would double the fuel efficiency of cars and trucks. Pressure two of the biggest banks on Wall St. -- JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo -- to say NO to the Keystone XL pipeline. Bombard Trump's Department of Energy with support for solar power.
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